tyger, tyger, burning bright
by s2lou
Summary: Once upon a time he painted his plane sky blue. WWII AU, KA. Secret Santa for, ah, 'wikipedia'.


**A/N: **Secret Santa for *cough* wikipedia. Any Hetalia-induced hallucinations you may have while reading this are entirely your own, m'dear. I don't think you mind, anyhow. /clings to

**Request:** A WWII AU with a changed, war-weary Kaito who's darker than in canon and also the victim. He's a fighter pilot for the Allies and is shot down, crashing into a town under Axis control. The townspeople take care of him, and Aoko lives there. How they meet is up to you. _Particulars:_ Have some conflict/action/suspense going on, not just mushy bedside scenes. Bonus; Book burnings. BONUS: Hakuba is a harboured Jew.

… which, y'know, was _hell_ to write. It just kept _growing_. And I'm afraid about half of it is composed of _mushy bedside scenes._ Moving on.

**Warnings:** There's a war going on, so some violence. Mentions of rape, but nothing explicit.

**Disclaimer: **I Do Not Own, nor do I make any money out of this. Claim goes, in no particular order, to Aoyama Gosho, Pablo Neruda, Isaac Rosenberg, Lewis Carroll, very faintly, John Milton, for the title, and, more anachronistically, the Monty Python.

**Summary: **Once upon a time he painted his plane sky blue.

**tyger, tyger, burning bright**

_Once upon a time he painted his plane sky blue. (This was in the early stages of the war, back when England still ruled over Europe, France had not yet fallen, and Japan wasn't much of an enemy.) If asked about it, he would laugh—most likely still in his RAF overalls and oil-stained gloves—and say it was so no one saw him coming. He would be like a bird, wing-tips white, swooping down onto unsuspecting enemies; and, when he landed at the end of the day, he would bring a piece of the sky down to the ground, to keep a dear prisoner, blue and close and precious._

_He was a boy then, as young in hours as he was young in years, extremely talented, and with self-confidence enough to fill up the sky._

_Once, they came in the night and painted a phoenix over his left wing. It was a good work of art, and people liked it: the symbolism of it was strong enough to please pilots all around—_the phoenix, _they said to him, _is always born again. No matter how many times they'll shoot you down, you'll always rise right back up.

_He never found out who had painted the phoenix there in the first place, though._

_(He only understood why, and at the same time understood the real symbolism of the bird, on a smoky afternoon of October '42, high above Japan: _before resurrecting, the phoenix has to go down in flames_.)_

_.._

He was going down in flames.

..

He is on fire.

He is on fire, his wings are on fire, his _body_ is on fire and the flames are licking at him even as he goes down, down, down—down the rabbit, the rabbit, the rabbit-y hole—and he waits for the crash but the crash never comes.

He is on fire. He is falling.

He falls and falls and falls and falls on, into the heat and into the flames, into the black forest that opens—and then the sound of bells, clear and silver, suddenly.

..

… there is a face very close to his. It is a huge face, half-eaten by wider eyes, and Kaito wonders if this is an angel, because the eyes are blue and hot. The face hardly moves at all for an eternity, and then, when it does, it is the mouth that does, slow and low and on the very edge of the blurs. It booms words, or maybe it doesn't, does not speak at all; maybe these are just rings in water, and bubbles that dilate with a soundless sound.

Then it stops, and the face stops moving as well. It is—the entire room—that spins now…

..

—he is on fire. The flames lick up his legs and arms and torso, run across his thighs and clothes, devour his fingers, catch at his hair. He is careful to keep his eyes shut, and keep his mouth shut, for if he ever opened them then the fire would get _in_, and he would be nothing but a flame, burning and red and hot.

They are burning him, he thinks wildly. They used to burn spies and witches, to burn those among enemies they caught unawares; they are burning him now where they found him, lying on the ground, right here where they found him. They have set fire to his plane, his beautiful, sky-blue White Phantom—the flames are devouring it, devouring him, devouring the earth and the air and the _sky —_

..

(He is flying, and then he is falling.)

..

—and the sky is not blue anymore, it's red. It's red over blue over white over _blue_ and—then it's redredredred_red_. Kaito thinks that it will be November soon, winter-white over all the red, all the _red _that stains and spreads over the white and the blue and the winter that sets in.

He grapples out, reaching out for the white and the blue: it's blue all around him and then it's white and he stands in a field of snow and then it is _red_—(and a field of what, a field of what is _that?)_

He chokes out red and he wonders if the flame has gotten _in,_ if the bile that stains over the white is but the fire retching his insides out. He wonders if the flame that is burning through him—burning _him_—will have consumed him entirely soon enough, and if the heat will subside then—it is hot, it is hot _it is hothotohotohot and how can it be so hot when _it is winter and _oh _so cold so so so _cold_?

… and then he wonders nothing at all.

..

"… cannot keep him in here…"

"… fever! can't even leave bed…"

"Dang—"

"… position is very clear. Thank—"

"… medicine. What about the…"

"Winter. It's getting cold..."

"You…"

"I will n—"

"… might come."

"They will not."

"What is that?"

"He is waking up. Please go now."

A door closes, deep and low.

..

_You are standing in the middle of a field of snow. Everything is white here, ground and sky alike. The snow is warm, or so barely cold, and so you do not move; lift your face to the white sun and breathe. In and out. In and out. The field dilates at the periphery of your field of vision—field over field over white over white over snow over snow. You breathe. The field dilates like a gigantic heartbeat._

_Ba-bump._

_Ba-bump._

_Ba-bump._

_You think about your heart—quite unnecessarily, but here is red within his chest now, pumping close and then loose, spreading through your veins, over the snow. White dilates at the corner of your eyes. Ba-bump. Red stains over the white, and—then he blinks, and—then white, fields of white and no red in sight._

_Ba-bump._

_The white dilates. You close your eyes._

..

(He is flying, and then he is falling.

He can hear the sharp sound of bells, silver-fine.)

..

_Don't strain yourself,_ the gigantic face says, and then: _Sleep._

Kaito sleeps.

..

"It will be alright," the woman says. She is yelling over the din in Kaito's ears and Kaito's eyes and Kaito's mouth, or maybe she isn't, not at all. She is standing at the door—blue and black and cold—and he can only see her back: the stiff spine of the dark-green dress, the darker brown of the blouse; he can't see her hands at all, and he thinks maybe she is holding them in her pockets. Or in front of her. Folded.

"It will be alright," she says again, and this time the din is dimming, and her voice is softer. Kaito doesn't hear the answer at all. "His fever has come down. It will be alright."

He wonders where the fire has gone. Maybe he has not burnt entirely down, and they have put the fire out. Maybe they intend to light it again later. In which case he should move—he _should_, but his hands and his arms will not shift. He wonders whether they've bound him down… whatever he's lying down on now. His head won't budge, either.

"Thank you," the woman says, and closes the door.

..

He is hot. He is so, so hot. The fire spreads and sheers, snarling across his skin and his flesh, roaring into his hair. It hasn't come down at all. Or maybe they have just come back, and lit it back again.

Something damp settles over his forehead. He snarls and grapples for it and claws at nothing but empty air. The fire is everywhere—here and there as well and _every_where, devouring whatever it is that makes his head cooler. He wonders if they are taunting him, teasing him with a water he cannot reach. The fire roars, deep within his flesh, all across his veins, and he is hot. He is so, so hot.

..

"How are you feeling?" the woman asks.

..

"How are you feeling?" the woman asks, and Kaito blinks and wakes and sleeps.

..

He is lying down in a bed. There are pillows behind his head and blankets on top of him and the definite weight of the mattress against his back; the light is dim and golden, spreading across a parquet ceiling and warm walls. He is in a bed, and not quite certain he understands.

"_Who are you?"_ he asks, in English, but the woman standing at the sink on the side does not look at him; her back is turned, dark-green dress and brown blouse. Her hair is very dark, he notices (or maybe it is simply that, despite the lit lamp, the room is dark), and he tries again, in French. _"Où suis-je?"_

She does not turn. Kaito frowns, and then settles on not. It makes his headache sprawl and preen about. (It relieves him a little that he actually does recognize it as such.)

"Where am I?"

The sound slips out to Japanese just then, surprising and sharper than he intended, and the woman starts and does turn. Her eyes are blue, huge in the dark bedroom before she narrows them at him. There is a basin filled with water between her hands.

"How are you feeling?" she asks, and Kaito's head swims with déjà-vu.

"Terrible," he croaks out truthfully, only that mustn't be the right answer, because she frowns at him.

"Are you hungry? Thirsty?"

"Starving," Kaito says. "Where am I?"

"Don't move out of the bed," she says, and leaves.

..

Her name is Aoko. She tells him, over the soup she feeds him an eternity later. "This is my house. Few people come here, and those who do do not ask the questions that matter. It is a safe place to be. Mostly."

"I am a pilot for the Allied Forces," Kaito says softly, swallowing.

"I know," she says, looking grim. And then she smiles. "I saw the plane."

..

"You've been very ill," she tells him later, smoothing out the blankets and bedsheets. Kaito groans and hits the pillow with the back of his head; he can feel sleep coming on to him, slow and silent, its cat-like paws brushing across his skin and half-shut eyelids.

"How long?"

"Pardon?"

"How long have I been here? since I crashed?" he clarifies, trying not to think of his plane at all, how it must have caught on fire after they got him out, and how _they_ is still an unknown quantity. He tries not to think about what is awaiting him behind that door. He thinks about it anyway.

"Almost a fortnight."

Kaito blinks. "What day is this?"

A pause, as though she hesitates, as though she is not quite certain herself. "The fifth of November."

"Oh," Kaito says, very quietly, and goes to sleep with _gunpowder, treason and plot_ ringing in his ears.

..

_Remember, remember_

_The fifth of November_

_Gunpowder, treason and plot_

_I see no reason why_

_The Gunpowder Treason_

_Should ever be forgot_

..

"Your plane crashed in the mill," Aoko tells him, much later. "It came down face-first—logically, you should have been crushed in the cabin," (—a little naively.) "You must have reeled back some time during the fall, because we found you in the hay." She does not elaborate. "What is the last thing you remember?"

"Falling," Kaito says through numb lips. "Fire. There was—it was everywhere."

"The fever," Aoko corrects, and taps the spoon on the side of the bowl. "You were already here then."

"There was another plane," he admits, sitting back against the pillows. They droop and slide against his back, shaping his spine. "A Japanese. He must have shot me down. But then why didn't he come down to check as well?"

"In the forest?" Aoko snorts, rather wryly. "Not likely."

"… ah." To be frank, he has no idea where he is. His route was to go over Nagoya, of course, but he may have flown astray while falling; and he has not caught a glimpse of _outside_ since he was brought here. "Then he must have thought I was lost after all."

"You very nearly were," Aoko says.

..

She does not ask anything about him but his name; does not even wonder at his being Japanese and yet flying a Royal Air Force plane. Kaito feels just slightly underplayed, and a little sorry: of all things it is one amongst the few which he can be sincere about. Aoko, though, seems content with coming and going, and being _here_ more often than not; _here_ is a little room—my father's, Aoko says, and does not elaborate, either. It has one window and one bed, and one door, which a little way away gives onto a half-open corridor. Nobody has come through ever since Kaito awoke, and he comes to wonder if he did not dream the previous visits.

Time passes the way it does when one is ill, and when Kaito wakes from dreaming there is no way for him to divine how many hours, or how many days, have passed since. Sometimes it is nighttime, and the window is dark; only a burning candle, seated sagely on the bedside table, displays its flickering honey'd light.

All is quiet. There is not a sound coming from _outside_, bar those of the wind, rattling against the glass, and, at times, the rough croak of a nightbird. They must be a little way from the village, Kaito thinks, as he listens to the night tumbling on. He shifts slightly against the pillows, hears the mattress creak and tremble with an odd sort of disquiet satisfaction.

Aoko is generally curled up in an armchair by the bed on those nights; she looks disturbingly young there, folded in on herself with both hands under one cheek. She looks barely rested, though, and it makes Kaito's throat dry and straining: it is in those moments that the notion of time becomes raggedly important, because he has been _here_ these last three weeks, and winter in coming on. If he does not leave before the first snow, he will not be able to leave the house at all—not until spring, the late spring with its early rains…

..

He wakes to the sharp sound of voices.

"… cannot stay here."

"But he must. Don't you see? He is very ill. Was. If he went out in this cold he might die."

"He has been staying here a month. The militia has heard about the mill…"

"We have erased all traces of the crash. Even if they were to send anyone to check in—"

"They _might —"_

"Which they _won't_, they will only see what we will tell them, a lightning-struck old building. If we all say—"

"Some mightn't."

"They _must._ If we all disagree with one another the militia will get suspicious. If we stick together, oh, please. He is ill. He will be better soon."

"This pilot of yours must have been shot down by _some_one, Aoko. Sooner or later whoever did it will boast about it within earshot of someone clever, and then—"

"It may never happen."

"—and _then_ they _will_ search round the country for him."

"Not in the middle of winter. By the time spring comes I will take him away."

"…"

"Just a few more weeks. Please. This is important."

"He cannot stay forever, Aoko."

"I know. I know."

..

_You're eight. There is the dark, hard shape of the Eiffel Tower cutting the sky in half in front of your eyes._

_It doesn't fit, not quite, you think, or maybe it does, cutting the mauve sky in halves, dark smoky grey clouds tornado'ed by the side of the horizon. Or maybe it doesn't, not in this town that is all colours and sounds, and beautiful people with beautiful tongues; iron tastes sour here, looks shiny and smoky and smells a little like pepper. Your _papa _blabbers in French in the corner of your eye, discussing postcards and cigarettes with the drugstore keeper as though your family of three is just there for the vacation, strangers in a stranger city._

_You're eight. You think about Japan, but it's blurred and far already, and you don't think you'll ever go back there. (You're wrong, of course. You don't know that yet. You only are eight, and so you don't know that yet.)_

Paris _rings in your head with the clear-sharp clarity of Notre-Dame bells, just a little farther off and down the Seine, and with it ring Paris' colours, silver and red and red and silver, and a sky so, so, and a sky so blue…_

"_Back pocket, love," your _maman_ says, with a quick smile and a quick caress down a quicker cheekbone._

_You figure this is as good a time as any to grin._

_You're eight. You think you don't fit in here either—or maybe you do._

_.._

He blinks up at a fine, wrinkly, beaming smile. "_Hullo_," he says, sleepily, and in English. English answers. He blinks again.

"_Hullo, _Kuroba-san," the smile says, materializing much in a Cheshire Cat fashion. "_Have you slept well?"_ The smile is an old man with receding whitish hair, and a very old-and-odd-looking tailcoat, and Kaito looks wildly out for the purple top hat before pulling himself heavily out of his dreams and Wonderland.

"Aoko?" he asks, throat dry.

"_Out for supplies,"_ the old man says, in English still. "_She has charged me to watch over you, _Kuroba-san." (Kaito relaxes. But only a little. They have come to the point that Aoko's presence soothes and hinges him at the same time, and being subjected to another's face and another's voice is more than just a little disturbing.)

He resorts to Japanese, for purposes unknown. "I, ah. Er. And you are."

"Kamanosouke Jii," the old man says.

Kaito blinks.

"Kamanosouke Jii," the old man elaborates, at that. And then: "Your father was a very great magician, Kuroba-san."

Kaito blinks. He tumbles into trust as he would down the rabbit's hole; again.

..

_You're ten. London is black-and-white where Paris was colours and sounds: black-and-white, and newspaper boys bicycling past with a ruffle of air and a blared shout, the sweet-sour smell of fizzling chestnuts farther off down the street. The people here are not beautiful, and no more beautiful is their tongue; but you think there's something more. Perhaps. (Or not at all, really, for all that you know in ten years of glory and bricked, smoke-made-dark buildings.)_

_Two boys, standing under the Union Jack, say, 'Tyre's out; Boon'll have your hide, Johnnie.'_

'_Will not. Ms, the _Times_, tuppence.'_

_Your windowed mother in black, gives the boy a shilling,—earning a toothless grin and an unwrinkled newspaper for her effort—and passes—with one hand at the small of your quaint-thin shoulders: ten years old, and in London, your heart is in black and white._

_.._

… and then the earth shakes and quakes, and the end comes much faster than intended.

"_Shut up_," Aoko says, and slaps an edgy hand over his mouth, breathing in close. "Bed. Out! _Now,"_ and fumbles him with sewing-deft fingers into rough clothing, smelling faintly of damp.

She peers out the door while he struggles with shoes and laces; his limbs are smooth and cold, unused after weeks of bedrest to either moving or the sharp, icy wind that hits them both when they step out in the corridor. She shields herself with a mantle that the moths are chewed through in several places, a memento of some higher time, and him with an oldish, but newer coat, and screws a bluecap over his head.

"All right?" she asks, eyes wide, and he nods as she blows out the lamp. Jii-san is standing at the far end of the corridor, looking down the street of the—yes, the street, hurling itself down from the house under a winding, dark-red sky.

_Bombings_, Kaito thinks, quite clearly, but they are far away still, closer to the towns by the coasts. The street is eerily silent, bar metallic trampling downward, into the mass of the village: they stand afar here, a little uphill, and Aoko urges him (urges them both, he thinks, until Jii clamps a hand over both their shoulders and disappears in a side-alley) alongside the walls, down toward the main street.

"The militia," Aoko says, within the breath of the course, "is down by the square. They've got word around of your being here. They're looking for you. You must go." Each sentence, delivered sharp and hammer-like, hampers Kaito's steps until he nearly stumbles in his haste.

"Where to?" he gasps, questioning.

"Farther," she says, and pushes him in the crooked shade of a door. "Hush." The trampling accelerates, not so much in the distance anymore, but rounding the corner, until Aoko slaps their bodies together and breathes in his shoulder, head bowed and slightly turned, hands cold and stilled.

The trampling passes them by without a second glance, and in no more time than Kaito needs to catch sight of dark uniforms and bobbing dark heads as the brigade—ten, a dozen of them maybe—stalks round and up the street which the two of them have just tiptoed down. They are gone within the ten following seconds, leaving behind the imprint of their presence like a secondhand ghost, floating uneasily in their dust.

Aoko separates herself from him slowly, eyeing up the street, and Kaito prepares to say, voice rough with disuse and his hammering heart, "That was cl—"

She grabs his elbow, swivels round, and balances them out with a whispered _this way_ up a quick flight of wooden steps that sidle alongside the wall. Kaito hears nothing but his own panting breath for one second, heaving himself up on the roof, and, and suddenly staring up, bewildered, at—_a million billion trillion stars—_before remembering, and ducking, behind a chimney. "Quickly," Aoko murmurs.

"All right," Kaito responds, quite as low, though less meaning to. "What now? We cannot stay on the roofs forever."

"Of course not," she snaps. "We'll wait till they have got far enough, and make way to the side of the village. There is no way down there, but there is a barn, and the hay should smother enough of our fall."

..

He had forgotten the smell of hay.

..

"What is this?" he asks, over half-an-hour later, standing together in front of the old, stone bulky building. It is not great, but it spreads enough, and the stories are tall. Bar from the door, there is but one opening, a thin, oval window under the very framework of the roof, a dark gap where the wall is—almost brutally, it seems—interrupted.

"The old mill," Aoko pants, wheezing, as she pushes open the door, nodding off his attempts to help. "It's grown inconvenient, because it is so very far from the village, so they built the new one—the one you crashed into—about ten years ago. No one ever comes he—"

She is abruptly disagreed with by a rifle muzzle sliding up to her chin.

"_Who are you_?" asks—unexpectedly, English, so Kaito's heart makes a flying leap in his chest, and then in Japanese: "_Show_ yourself."

"It's me, Hakuba-kun," Aoko says mildly, not very perturbed by the sudden death threat.

"And him?" the voice asks, and Kaito, training perking up at the best of moments, can hear the subtleties in it now—the slipping English accent, the Piccadilly twist at the far end of the question, the slight, unwanted hesitation, perhaps.

"A friend." Pause; nobody moves. "From England."

The rifle descends.

..

"Why," says Hakuba, very clearly and cleanly, "is a Japanese man flying pilot for England?" and stretches his hands over the roaring flames. The inner mill is quite empty, but only the very centre of it is so devoid of hay and straw and rice that it is possible to light a fire in it, in a tight circle of assembled stones.

"Why," Kaito asks, stretching his legs out, "is an Englishman hiding in an old mill deep in the countryside?" and gathers the quilt around his shoulders. He is sitting over a haybed, paternally arranged with odd-patchworked blankets.

Aoko rolls her eyes and continues heating up tomato soup.

"Exiled family," Kaito says, after a moment.

"Jewish descent," Hakuba says shortly, and that's an understanding, of sorts.

"Eat up," Aoko says.

..

This, after some more coaxing and a little whiskey in the soup, is Aoko's story:

"My father—died, in the early stages of '38. We've always lived here, and with my mother long gone, there was always Jii-san to take care of me. When the war began, me and Keiko took a job at the local school—reading stories to the children and stuff, helping them out with work and food—lots of parents are out downtown or fighting, so we're supposed to care for them good.

"We used to bring them back home, too, in the evening, so they wouldn't get lost, not that they would anyway, the village's not that big. Anyway, last winter the militia came down from town. They stayed about a week here, said they were making checks around the families, started asking questions if we were really Japanese with no foreign blood… they didn't take anyone here, but I hear they did take away some people a few paces down the hill. I don't think anybody has ever seen them before.

"They drank a lot, too. One evening in October, while we—Keiko and I—were bringing the last children home, they stopped us on our way back.

"I don't know why they didn't choose me, or why they didn't think two were better than one. They were drunk, the lot of them, or maybe they thought Keiko was prettier than I, or—I don't know. I don't want to know, really. Keiko said it was going to be all right, and maybe she thought it would be. Maybe she really believed she was going to go home afterwards. And she did, in a way.

"I ran to the mayor, but he wasn't there—and if he had been, I don't suppose he _would_ have helped, if he could. I called up his wife and the elder's daughter and the school mistress. They called up their friends, too. By the time we came back where I'd left Keiko, they'd already gone.

"We found Keiko the next morning—spent the entire night searching, and then we found Keiko in the morning. In the old barn. I suppose that's where they raped her. I don't—I don't remember how many of them there were, but she was—covered in blood and—she didn't even stir when we brought her home. She was breathing. But she didn't even open her eyes."

Pause.

"She died after a week. She didn't wake up once—I couldn't even tell her how much I'd wanted to help, how I'd have gone instead if I could have, how very, very sorry I was… she just went out. She was there in the evening and the next morning she was gone."

Pause.

"We buried her two days after that. The ground was not yet frozen enough that we couldn't dig a grave in it, and I didn't want her to be burned because, well, because it'd take too long. Because I'd have to watch her go for a very, very long time.

"I hate the militia—what these men did, what they did to her and to me and to _us_, to the people here, it's wrong, it's just, it's just _wrong_. It's not how things should be. I don't know who's right and who's _not_ in this war—I don't have much in the way of politics, really—but I do know that when somebody's hurt, he ought to be helped.

"I remember Keiko in that bed, covered in blood. And later, when we washed her.

"If someone's hurt, or wounded, in war or otherwise, whichever side they'd on, I must help them. It's my only lookout and it's pretty selfish. I do know that. But it's the only way out I can get."

..

_You return to France, only transfigured. And dark. And cold._

_The trenches seep your cool and your warmth out of you, sucking them out of your mouth and eyes and ears and pores, sucking them out like light until you are left empty, sitting weakly against a stack of ammunition sacks. The sky is violet, and laden, and wrong. It is May, 1940, but it really doesn't feel like 1940, May, not at all._

_You think about how sweet Provence was once, one Spring when _papa_ took you and your mum down to the Southern lands. Lavender bright the sky was then—violet-laden now—bursting richly, a great arch over the gold-fine fields._

_The rat in the trenches are running _pi-ti-pon pi-ti-pon pi-ti _with crumbs of bread and meat and stone, dragging them out in holes, in the holes of the wood and mud castle you're all standing on. There's a riddle on the very edge of your mind, and it goes_

built a castle in the swamp

it sank

built a second castle in the swamp

it sank

built a third castle in the swamp

(and it)

_The earth shakes, or perhaps the sky. You open your eyes. And open your eyes. And open your eyes._

(pi-ti-pa pi-

_the rats go down in the trenches)_

..

He wakes up abruptly, body breaking a rushing sweat, and the first thing he thinks it how ironic it is, that it's only when his fever's come down that he's remembering this again. The second thing he sees is hawk eyes peering down at him in the thin light of fire and dawn combined.

Hakuba sits back on his heels. "Bad dream," he says.

..

_What do you see in your eyes_

_At the shrieking iron and flame_

_Hurled through still heavens?_

_What quaver —what heart aghast?_

_Poppies whose roots are in man's veins_

_Drop, and are ever dropping…_

_.._

Hakuba is a hungry man.

He makes do for his hours of waiting with an unquenchable thirst for England and London, the trams' rattling ways, the whitewashed dust and sticky newsprints. They sit hunched together over the fire, still defiant, still hesitant, but glad; upon leaving, Aoko leaves English between them like a peace offering. The words are somewhat clumsy on their lips and between their fingers, but they become latent and powerful and sure, charged together, fire-rapid.

Kaito talks the most, voice rough and ill-fitted to the exercise, but Hakuba interrupts, says _No; no, it wasn't like that, it wasn't so_ and Kaito, in for a loop, does not discuss, watches the fire instead, lets his lips curl in, _Maybe._

It reminds him of boarding-schools, and roofs, the way Hakuba drawls out his syllables with a shrug of the shoulders; careful, but. Just. Boarding-schools and roofs and he used to go up them with these two best mates of his, used to clatter up rain-slippery tiles and stuff cloth and woodwork in chimneypots, and grill lamb chops. It reminds him, the way Hakuba moves, stretches fingers over the fire, takes out a dilapidated Conan Doyle from his coat pocket.

_I've got to go back home, _Hakuba says.î

..

1942, December 1st: It snows.

1942, December 2nd: Aoko's footprints make little bird-marks in the white, and she is wrapped in a dark quilt and darker kimono as she waves at Kaito, perched at the narrow oval window as he is, at six o'clock-odd in the morning.

(They have decided to take turns, Hakuba and he, all night, and Kaito is completely unable to sleep in the morning, anyway.)

"Don't wake him," she shushes, glancing over at Hakuba's hunched form on the side of the fireplace. "He has been along here long enough—" and then, as he scrambles down from his perch in the framework sky, appraising him hardly, "I am glad you're here, you know."

"So am I," he says, leading her astray and accepting the sausages (most likely they will result in another argument over cooking tonight, but the package is greasy and heavy in his hand, and that's quite enough for him right now). "Do you think he is?"

She smiles. "I know."

"Right," Kaito says, and smiles back, holding on to the sleeve of her kimono, soft and faded.

..

"What is that?" Hakuba says, and Kaito looks up. He ought to be asleep, but the fire is not quite so soothing as it usually is, and the night smells of smoke and sour wood. He ought to be asleep, and perhaps he is just dozing off when the other man's sharp exclamation jerks him out of the hay and to his feet, staggering.

"What?"

Hakuba is ghost-like up in the unnatural light, seated haphazardly by the tiny skylight, torn between shivering gold and growing shadows. He stares out. "There is a fire. A great fire. Kuroba—"

"Aoko," Kaito says, and is out of the door. By then he can see it himself, a great, soaring flames far between the trees, much closer to the village than it is to them; he is so shocked he does not even protest when Hakuba runs straight into him in his haste to step out, but grabs his wrist and drags him forward.

"I've heard about this," Hakuba says as they creep between the trees and roots and drooping branches. "The censure is getting a lot stricter around these parts, just like in Europe, and any documents that do not fit the regime's orders are to be destro—" He stops, for they are quite close to the fire now, only a few yards apace, and blessfully hidden by the dropping boughs. The uniforms' buckles glisten in the funny light, and they are not alone in the woods; the villagers move, murmuring, all around them, like voices from the trees.

"Aoko," Kaito murmurs, and moves closer to her, where she stands with her arms tight around her chest, shivering.

"You shouldn't be here," she murmurs, looking straight ahead, at the flames. "If they catch you—"

"We won't say a word about you," Kaito says, and makes to unfold her in his coat, makes to wrap himself around her and never let go, but she inches back a bit. "Aoko. Aoko—did any of them hurt you?"

"No," she says, eyes unmoving. "I'm quite all right." She lets his fingers curl around hers, though, lets her palm nestle against his, cool and fluttering, like a quivering bird. She nods at the trees, at the fire; her voice is so terribly cool and detached that Kaito can hear his heart break a little, along with hers. "They threw in the schoolbooks. I saw them get rid of _Persuasion_."

Her lips twitch.

"They said the title reeked strongly of English propaganda. _Persuasion_!_"_ and, just like that, she breathes; the word lifts the weight over his voice and makes her look a little crazier, a little more natural. "Oh, _kami…"_

"'s all right," Kaito mutters, though it's not. Aoko curls in and smiles a little.

"It's not."

"No," he admits. She starts to cry.

Many, many years later, Kaito will not remember of this moment the slow, rolling tears that curved down her cheeks, nor the unnatural blue of her shining eyes. He will not remember Hakuba's slow movings behind them, his careful whisperings with Jii-san. He will not remember the fire and the crackling books, and the wispy smoke that brought words of grace to the heavens—will not even remember the way the soldiers' books cracked and glistened near them, so near a breath could have disrupted their attention.

He will remember the exact moment Aoko stops crying, the last blink, the full-hearted sniff before she turns her face from his shoulder, and the way their hands hold on tight to each other even then, fingers clenched so strong together, skin, flesh, bone.

..

_You are taken in the net of my music, my love,_

_and my nets of music are wide as the sky._

_My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning._

_In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begin._

_.._

_You were the three only Japanese boys in school, all three of you, and not particularly well-liked. (This was an international boarding-school, mind, but in England that often meant European.) One is smart, one is raucous and blustering, and you, you are the cleverest of all three, sneaky and easy and fine even as you bring the roof tumbling down on your heads._

_It's early morning of late August, 1932, and you lick fried-chop grease off your slightly burnt fingers. _

_Shinichi is lying down, both hands threaded in his hair, behind his head; Heiji is clambering over the tiles, stuffing the fire with more twigs and biting back yelps when the fire scalds forth; you sit, unusually silent (verbally, at any rate, but you make soft little noises as you reach out for another lamb chop), vaguely wondering if the dawn's gonna come or not._

_It does, eventually, and you point and you shout and you laugh even as the furious reds and oranges explode all over your heads, flaring up atop the tiled roofs and whipping out the fire. There is a minute, that floats easily, like water, like light within water, and your laughter sounds like a prayer, godlike and awful, a bubbling, irrepressible chant for light and hope and the beautiful day that is born, bruising your eyes and mouths._

_.._

"Tomorrow's Christmas Eve," Aoko says, bent over the fire, and Kaito starts. He has lost count of days recently, and so he stares at Aoko, hunched together with her legs folded underneath her, seeking warmth, hands flitting over the food; Aoko, suddenly gaining, with three thin little words, a strange, fleeting otherworldliness. She blinks up at him, brushing back her bangs. She needs a haircut, he thinks suddenly, fondly.

"Tomorrow?" he asks, casting an interrogative glance at Hakuba, sitting close with his book, who nods without even looking up.

"I'm quite certain," Aoko says, and straightens up somewhat, as much as she can without her hair sliding forth and into the fire. "Jii-san and a neighbour were talking about it yesterday, when I returned from getting the food."

Hakuba dog-ears his book and taps the binding, thoughtfully enough that she looks over, puzzledly. "This is Japan," he says. "Do you even celebrate Christmas?"

"Not really," Aoko says, shrugging. "But you'd like to know. I thought."

"Okay," says Kaito, agreeably, and stretches his long legs toward the fire. "Tomorrow, then."

..

When it comes, they don't celebrate, much. Kaito remembers Christmas in Paris, with his two parents, the garland of lights and candles his _papa_ had brought and that they lit on the fir tree, his _maman'_s smiles as she baked dinner, the presents in the morning, under the roofs. He remembers one Christmas in London, not particularly amusing, though she was doing all she could; and enough Christmases at school to remember in a muddled way, laughter and shouts and lights and turkey and sweets and the warm, basking feeling of thorough satisfaction.

They make tea in an old, chipped kettle, which doesn't stop Hakuba from latching onto it with the looks of a starved man, and they eat burnt sausages and kippers and smooth, sticky rice with muffled gusto and briefly scalded fingers, because over a month and they still have yet to bring in anything beyond a frying pan. Hakuba reads _The Hound Of The Baskervilles_ out loud to them, and he knows it almost by heart by now: his voice grows and falls with the easy regularity of tiding waves.

They choose to keep on the night watches, and Hakuba volunteers for the first, climbing the thin, balancing ladder to their bird-nest; Aoko, having decided to stay the night instead of going home to light and warmth, nestles into the hay, and Kaito, after a second's hesitation, joins her, huddling their bodies close together. There is light in the way their eyes clash and burn, after all, and warmth in the tangle of their limbs, arms and legs twined easily together. Aoko's hand falls into the crook of Kaito's shoulder, thin and firm.

"Missed this," he murmurs, lips brushing the tip of her nose.

"What?"

"This."

"Oh. Mmm." She smiles.

They cuddle together like children, curling in on the curves and dips they discover under fleeting fingers, relishing in laughter. The fire crackles to the side, casting exaggerated shadows all over the old mill, over Aoko's hair and Kaito's mouth, over this Christmas Eve like none else before.

They sleep, after a while.

..

Kaito dozes rather fitfully until Hakuba wakes him, a sharp jerk of the wrist. "It's two in the morning," he says, voice whispery and thin, blond hair fairly mussed. And then: "Where are all the blankets gone?"

There's one tugged tight around Aoko's legs, just coming short of her waist. "Dunno," Kaito says, and then catches sight of one sprawled on the other side of the fire. "Over there." Hakuba nods, pats his shoulder, presses the whiskey flask in his hand, and makes his way over, to silence and sleep.

Kaito climbs the ladder as he would climb, once, in his plane. It holds the same breathless feeling as he settles down on the thin platform by the skylight, and the horizon, outside, is dark-lined and blurred. There are no more glimmers flitting through the trees; the village, most probably, is asleep: the two lights that remain are that of the fire and that of the stars, mingling on Kaito's lap like water.

He thinks about the last month he spent in this mill, Hakuba a constant company, Aoko's more surprising and more pleasant. He thinks about Holmes, and their long readings as the evening tumbles; thinks about the thick honey Jii-san brought back from the market on Saturday, how it stuck and coated their fingers, slippery and sweet; thinks about his early mornings, when the sky is white as snow and he can almost believe that he is flying again.

Glancing down, now, at Hakuba, settling himself down with his book; at the fire, its trembling circle their haven of light and repose; at _Aoko_, curled up in the hay like a great cat at rest; glancing down, Kaito is struck by a sudden, unexpected surge of affection for these two human beings with their great eyes and their growing hearts—an affection that is intense and surprising, and makes everything feel warmer.

_.._

_There is a minute, between thought and silence, and thought again, when the world around disappears, and nothing else remains than a strong, warm circle of light, good friends and strong liquor, horror stories and kisses stolen, fleetingly, between fingertips. There is an evening, between day and day again, before the world begins its spinning course anew, when you can sit back and laugh and say, _This is who I am, this is where I belong.

All is well.

Goodnight.

..

**End Notes: **Christmas is a magical time of the year. For my part, it may be nothing more than the mere child's fascination with all the pretty lights, and the furious expectation of presents in the morning, which always makes me quite unable to sleep on the evening of the 24th. But I've harboured this fascination for almost twenty years, and I'm not ready to let go of it yet. So anyone who reads this, reviews this, enjoys this, even just a little, thank you so much. I hope you liked it. And I hope you have a very merry Christmas.


End file.
